Rockfish Games has announced that they are delaying the Early Access of their Kickstarter-funded sequel, Everspace 2. The game is being pushed out of the initial release window for a variety of reasons. The reason for the delay stems from a need for the team to better balance the game’s need for polish and new features. The game will still be getting its pre-release beta for Kickstarter backers though, so that’s good. As the team works to polish this initial launch with the basic features of Everspace 2 in place. The team just couldn’t reconcile the launch of Everspace 2 Early Access at the same time anymore.
“Porting the original Everspace to last-gen consoles was quite a challenge for us back in the day, so we can only imagine what a challenge it must be to bring a massive title like Cyberpunk 2077 to Xbox One and PlayStation 4,” says Michael Schade, CEO & co-founder of Rockfish Games, showing solidarity with the issues surrounding crunch and the delay of Cyberpunk 2077.
Going further, the team says that they also need to think about the packed gaming schedule they were originally going to release into. “Let’s get the cyber elephant out of the room right away: The Cyberpunk 2077 release has just been pushed back to December 10, which is a major blow to our planned Everspace 2 Early Access release in mid-December,” the studio said in a Kickstarter update. “Not only will every media outlet and content creator cover the arguably most-anticipated AAA game in history throughout the entire holiday season (and not much else), we also know that there’s quite a bit of audience overlap within our community (and our team).”
It’s a pretty sound plan. Such a huge AAA release will clog the bandwidth of gaming outlets and streams for the days following the release of Cyberpunk 2077. Better to avoid the mad rush to get coverage of other games in.
The planned pre-release beta for Kickstarter backers will still go forward, starting this week on November 2. The beta will go into the newly revamped crafting system in detail, showing off the ship upgrades that will be a core part of the final game. New ships and ship classes will also debut during the build. As for who is getting access, it’s pretty much everyone who backed it. Anyone who pitched into the fund at the €30 level or higher will get a key.
They did offer some consolation to angry users, or those who missed out. The developer will be giving out more codes for that Beta. “Furthermore, we also plan to give away 200 additional Beta pre-release keys good for the closed beta only through media partners and our weekly community streams to ease the pain for a few lucky space pilots.”
This is by no means the only delay induced by the pushing back of Cyberpunk 2077. Grinding Gear Games announced that they were pushing back Path of Exile 3.13 and its related expansion late last week.
